NYGOP Chair Ed Cox this morning released the following statement in response to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inauguration speech:
“While we had intended to give the City’s new administration a proper honeymoon, the unnecessary meanness of its inauguration requires a response.”
“The new Mayor has unleashed a new politics of envy that encourages metaphors of our great and humane City as a ‘plantation’ at his inauguration.”
“Bill de Blasio was elected with only 17.5 percent of the City’s voters and needs to firmly renounce such talk and call for the unity that he needs to manage our great and diverse City.”
Not only did Reverend Fred Lucas Jr. refer to the city as a plantation, he compared Bill de Blasio’s inauguration to the Emancipation Proclamation, calling forth “the trumpets of heaven” to guide the mayor in emancipating New Yorkers from their “shackles.”
Reverend Lucas wasn’t the only one to play racial politics at the event. Harry Belafonte decried the racial inequality in the city’s prison systems, while former President Bill Clinton spoke not only of New York City’s lack of income equality, but the inequality of the entire nation.